Jockey Club Wants U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in Charge

Ogden Mills Phipps, chairman of The Jockey Club, said reform had moved too slowly.

Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

By JOE DRAPE

March 28, 2014

The Jockey Club, one of horse racing’s most influential groups, said it would support federal legislation to put the United States Anti-Doping Agency in charge of bringing law and order to a sport that has been unable to eradicate a pervasive drug culture that has put horses and riders at risk and alienated some fans.

The club’s chairman, Ogden Mills Phipps, conceded that efforts to reform the sport from within had moved too slowly, and in some cases not at all. The industry has come up with a national uniform medication program after years of embarrassing scandals, but only 4 of the 38 states with racing have fully implemented it.

The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act — written by Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, and Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania — has been introduced in Congress and would give Usada the authority to develop rules for permitted and prohibited substances and mete out meaningful punishments.

Usada is a nongovernmental organization that has worked with the United States Olympic team and Major League Baseball and was relentless in its pursuit of the cyclist Lance Armstrong, who acknowledged systematically using drugs.

“We will aggressively seek rapid implementation, including steps leading toward the elimination of all race-day medications,” Phipps said in the statement. “With the safety of our horses, the integrity of competition and the general perception of the sport all at risk, we cannot afford to wait any longer. Enough is enough.”

The announcement came on the heels of investigations by racing authorities in New York, Kentucky and New Mexico into accusations that the trainer Steve Asmussen and his top assistant, Scott Blasi, treated their horses cruelly, gave drugs to their horses for nontherapeutic purposes and had a jockey use an electrical device to shock them into running faster. Asmussen, who ranks second in career victories, had been on the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame ballot, but his name was removed after the accusations were leveled last week by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The accusations were based on an undercover investigation by PETA that included videotaped recordings.

PETA also accused Asmussen of employing undocumented workers, requiring them to use false names on I.R.S. forms and conspiring with Blasi to produce false identification documents, according to complaints filed with federal agencies. The allegations were first reported in The New York Times.

“It is my hope that these state bodies use all the prosecutorial powers available to determine if there is evidence of animal cruelty, medication violations — and cheating,” Phipps said. “Like so many others, I was upset by what I read in The Times and disgusted by what I saw and what was alleged in that PETA video. Any person abusing a horse or caught with an electronic stimulation device like the one described in the video should be banned from the sport for life.”

He continued: “And as much as it pains me to see our industry being denigrated in the media, there is another part of me that feels that we, as an industry, deserve every bit of that criticism because the sport’s rules and our penalties have not been effective deterrents.”